1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is generally related to system and method for network conference, and particularly related to a network conference system having individual changeable rights of each participant.
2. Description of the Related Art
In modern days, geographical restriction or physical separation of people at a working group does not impose a serious communication problem due to the utilization of telecommunication equipments. Pure audio or even video does not satisfy the full exchange of meaningful representation in some circumstances. Therefore, a remote conference or so-call teleconference system is provided to serve the need of a group meeting.
Please refer to FIG. 1, which shows a normal fixed design of a conventional teleconference system built on Internet as the interconnection network. In the upper part of such design, all participants are equal in capturing, encoding, and sending audio and video media streams into the interconnection network. For the receipt ends of the media streams, all incoming streams are decoded and played back to the speaker and display shown in the lower part of the FIG. 1. In some other PC based systems, participants can select the image of others to view on the display. But from the view point of sending and receiving data stream, for all participants, they have all equal rights and the system is equivalent to the conventional teleconference systems.
The drawback of conventional system is the lack of flexibility to configure a meeting according to some specific needs of various scenarios. Not each participant needs the same encoding and decoding requirements. However, the conventional systems do not consider the requirement to adjust the configurations or rights of each individual participant.